John Dies at the End (R)

While based on a prose web serial by David Wong, the pseudonym of Jason Pargin, John Dies at the End feels remarkably like the work of a sensibility frozen at about 1996. Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes combat supernatural happenings only they can see in Anytown, USA, speaking in that sarcastic Kevin Smith/You Don’t Know Jack voice so ubiquitous in the ’90s, and share the smirking interplay usually reserved to eminently slappable, 20-something bros going through the drive-thru in fast-food commercials. The garrulousness and temporally shuffled narrative is off-the-rack Tarantino; the bizarro mind-benders, “Lynchian”; the horror-comic asides combining the mundane and the fantastic, “Raimi-esque”; the grab-bag borrowing of avant-garde techniques, straight-up Natural Born Killers. The CGI is close to what you would encounter in PC gaming during the Clinton administration, and a “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)” spoofed “wigger” shows up and says “ganked,” which I am fairly certain is no longer in common parlance. I have concluded, then, that John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old — and, oh, it is terrible. Wong’s stories snowballed in pageview popularity to the point of earning a proper publication by St. Martin’s Press — and now this. Gathering an audience through online word-of-mouth, Wong has created a genuine cult phenomenon. Writer-director Don Coscarelli’s film, however, groans with the strain of attempting to heave a cult object into being.

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